]]>“The vote on the Defense of Marriage Act was very interesting. You had five justices saying this denies gays and lesbians equality and liberty guaranteed by the Constitution, and I think that says an awful lot because that will carry down the road in other cases. I think this may be a precursor for a ruling that says any discrimination based on sexual orientation by the state is suspect and will only be upheld in extraordinary circumstances.” Watch our conversation with correspondent Tim O’Brien, managing editor Kim Lawton, and host Bob Abernethy.

]]>FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It was an unusual sight at Mass last Sunday [January 9] in the dusty regional capital of Bentiu. There were empty seats. But Father Samuel Akoch didn’t seem to mind, because this was an improbable historic day in Southern Sudan. Most of the absentees were around the corner, lining up for the chance to vote for secession, to create their own nation

REV. SAMUEL AKOCH (Saint Martin de Porres Catholic Church): I know that each of you came here to pray. I also know that each one of us is carrying our voting card in our pocket.

DE SAM LAZARO: And as the service concluded, it took on the fever of a campaign rally. Those voting cards came out and Father Samuel led a bee-line to the polling center, joining hundreds already there. Their ballot choice was as simple as the set-up of this polling center under a tree: Stay as one Sudan or separate into a new republic of South Sudan. That was the overwhelming favorite here. Father Samuel imagined that nation.

REV. AKOCH: People will be free to express their own religion, they will use their resources without anybody telling them no, so it is really great help for us to see this day. It was many people have died and they never saw this.

DE SAM LAZARO: The predominantly Christian and traditionalist black African Southern Sudan has seen almost nonstop war with the Arabic-speaking and Muslim North since the country’s independence from Britain in 1956. Two million people are thought to have died in recent years in the battered South, an impoverished land even though rich oil reserves were discovered here in the 1980s. A few feet under this fading sign is a pipeline that conveys crude oil from here in the South north to the port of Port Sudan. It’s a metaphor for the South’s complaint. The pipeline, like the oil wealth, they say, is invisible here in the South.

Oil added a new intensity to the conflict in the ‘90s, a period which also saw the rise of the Islamist regime of Omar al Bashir. He’s since been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his role in the Darfur conflict in Western Sudan. But it’s the enduring North-South war that got the attention of evangelical Protestants in America. They saw it as a religious conflict.

REBECCA HAMILTON (Journalist and Author): The evangelical community has been pivotal in the battle of Southern Sudan for its freedom, and they framed the war with the North as a battle for religious freedom, and in many ways that was true…

DE SAM LAZARO: Religious freedom for Christians.

HAMILTON: Religious freedom for Christians in the South. In many ways it was true, because the Northern government was trying to Islamize the South, but it was also a very useful framing of the conflict for getting the attention of key members of the United States Congress.

JOHN ASHWORTH (Catholic Relief Services): I think in the United States you had the coming together of the right-wing evangelicals, the [Congressional] Black Caucus, and the liberal human rights organizations. There’s probably no other situation in the world where those three groups would have common ground. But I think we also have to say that 9/11 played a role in bringing about the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement]. On 9/11, the United States woke up to the reality that things happening in far-away countries had direct implications for the United States, and from that point we saw a much greater engagement with Sudan—Sudan, of course, having a history of being involved with so-called terrorist movements.

DE SAM LAZARO: Finally, in 2005 an American-brokered peace agreement was reached which called for this week’s referendum and also a sharing of oil revenues. At this church building—destroyed by fighting in the 1980s and now, ironically, a polling center—voters expressed hope that their sad history of slavery and exploitation would soon end.

KAFI ABUSALLAH: We have been mistreated by the Khartoum government, and we will show them that we want to stand firmly alone.

PETER PAL: The Northerners have made us their slaves for a long time, and we are ready to show them that we can lead ourselves. We are looking for good hospitals, good schools, good roads.

MARY DOAR: Our resources have never benefited us. Now we will get the benefit of our own resources.

DE SAM LAZARO: Managing voter expectations will be only one of several daunting tasks for the government of a new South Sudan. Keeping the peace is another immediate priority—not just with the North but within the South.

HAMILTON: South Sudan is itself a hugely divided community, and we haven’t seen for years because it’s been the greater enemy in the North, but I think once that enemy of the North is gone we will see all sorts of ethnic tensions rising inside the South.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Southern churches—Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican, and others—have held ecumenical services for a peaceful referendum and will play a pivotal role in reconciling the South’s ethnic groups, whose rivalry stems mostly from land, water, and grazing rights for cattle. It’s a familiar role.

ASHWORTH: During the decades of war there was no infrastructure in the South except the church. There was no government, there were no NGOs, no UN, no civil society, and even the traditional leadership of chiefs and elders had been eroded by the coming of the young men with the guns. The church is the only institution which remained here with its infrastructure intact. It remained on the ground with the people. Now because of that we gained huge moral authority.

DE SAM LAZARO: Another key figure is former president Jimmy Carter. With Rosalynn Carter he’s been observing the polls and met with leaders from both North and South. On both sides the former president said he’d received assurances that religious minorities would be protected.

JIMMY CARTER: I met extensively with President Salva Kiir, and he assured me, first of all, that there would be absolutely no restraint on religious freedom in the South, that everybody, Islamic or Christian or Buddhist or whatever, would be free to worship as they chose. In the North, of course, they had had sharia law for many years, and there has been some accommodation for people of other faiths, Christians and others. President Bashir assured me this week that the same guarantees of the rights of other people to worship in different ways would be preserved, and they would not be harassed. He promised me personally that they would protect the churches and other things and protect the right of people to worship as they choose.

DE SAM LAZARO: There remain sensitive issues that could inflame tensions or worse: drawing borders, deciding on the rights of Southerners living in the North and vice versa, and a critical permanent oil-sharing revenue agreement still needs to be negotiated.

The new South Sudan, should that nation emerge, will be one of the poorest on earth. Paved roads, hospitals, and schools are virtually nonexistent, and the peace remains precarious. But all those worries have been cast aside by the euphoria of this moment—the chance, these people say, for the first time in their history for first-class citizenship.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Bentiu, Sudan.

]]>I spent most of this morning working for the Obama campaign here in my hometown of Charlottesville. I’ve been away from home since Thursday at a conference. First thing in the morning my family got up, got dressed, and we all went off to vote. I took my daughter and baby son into the booth with me, and my daughter got to help select our choices and then confirm the ballot. My wife, who is Canadian, had never been to an American polling site before; she found it quite moving–all the people, excited outside, the matronly poll workers, even the middle-aged men seeming to move with the understated, regal deliberation of grandmothers.

After I cast my ballot, I began, somewhat covertly, to cry. I squeezed my daughter’s shoulder hard enough with love and hope to make her scold me. Then it was off with her to school, and the rest of the day has been a whirl of data-entry, driving voters to the polls, getting balloons for this evening’s party, and generally participating in the highly oxygenated anxiety that is a party’s local headquarters on the day of the election. I found it deeply exciting, but also humbling, even awe-inspiring, in a way for which I wasn’t fully prepared.

Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the curious, and not entirely unhappy, coincidence of meanings in the word “election.” On the one hand, citizens elect representatives; on the other, prevalent in the faiths stemming from Abraham, God elects humans–first a people to be God’s messengers and representatives to the world, and then, through them (but not canceling out their election), and in Christ, all of humanity to be God’s children. An election is something someone does, to be sure; but it is also something that happens to people, as well. There is a remarkable coordination of theological and political significance in “election,” and it is worth noting–if only to resist the powerful idolatrous temptations it presents to us.

Those temptations have such power, not least because they identify quite profound resonances between politics and theology in general. After all, so much of politics, as it exists today in this impatient, petulant, risibly sin-riddled world, is waiting. We wait at rope lines for candidates to pass; we wait for election returns to arrive late at night, faces pale in the sterile glow of TV screens; we wait while a canvasser reads us his talking points on the phone, or urges us to support her candidate on our doorstep.

Less obviously, we wait for our friends and family and neighbors and co-workers and new acquaintances to enumerate, in what often seems to us inexplicably, narcissistically meticulous detail, why their chosen candidate or cause is obviously the only right one, wondering all the while where to begin in disputing their whole way of seeing the world. Sometimes we must even wait for our own minds to make up their opinions on issues we feel we need to have a view on now, if not yesterday. And always we wait to see–with fear and trembling, if we are pious and wise–whether the political causes we supported ultimately turn out the way we hoped they would turn out. (Usually this means waiting to find out how, precisely, we shall be disappointed.) Much of public life is spent enduring interminable time, when time itself drones on.

And then, sometimes suddenly, a change comes. Everything happens, all at once: deliberation ends, the ballots are cast, the votes counted, decisions made, the New Thing emerges. The old order–which seemed so solid, so firm, so unchanging–is swept away by the unprecedented. Politics is a disconcerting concatenation of kairos and ordinary time, with jarring shifts from one to the other, a kind of wild oscillation between “now” and “not yet,” the world as we know it and the Kingdom coming.

Lord knows there has been enough messianism and enough demonization in this campaign. People on both sides have participated in both of these temptations; I certainly have. It’s obviously a temptation to be avoided.

And yet.

There is, after all, more than a superficial connection between the two realities. People do treat their faith like a simulacrum for politics all the time–assuming that religious differences easily classify all of us in this world, separating us into clear categories. And we all know what it means to treat politics with religious fervor, especially here in the United States. Since the beginning, American politics has been saturated with not just superficial pieties, but with profound theological currents as well. We’ve always been involved with a more or less self-conscious quarrel with God over whose election was more important–God’s election of the people Israel, or our election of our leaders, and behind them, of ourselves.

Beyond these rivalries between America and America’s God, however, there seems to me a still deeper analogy to which we should attend. It lies in the ambiguities of that term “election.”

To be elected is to be marked out in a special way, to be sure. But election is not an unambiguously happy fate. It certainly hasn’t been one for the people Israel. It wasn’t for Jesus Christ. And Christian theology says it should not be understood as one for the graciously elected. The fundamental obligation of God’s elect is to be present before and available to God, to say, in ancient Hebrew, hinneni: “Here I am.” Hinneni was Abraham’s answer to God’s call to sacrifice Isaac, Samuel’s reply to God’s call to become a prophet, the reply of the people Israel in Sinai to God’s election of them as a people. (It was also what Adam and Eve did not say to God in the garden, and what Cain did not say to God after killing Abel.) To say “here I am” is a deceptively simple thing to say; but it leads those who offer it, as a kind of sacrifice to God, to terrible places. It leads, as the risen Jesus says to Peter in the Gospel of John, to death: “When you are an old man, you will stretch out your hands and another will gird you and take you where you do not want to go.” “When Christ calls a man,” the twentieth-century martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “he bids him come and die.”

Election to the presidency, too, is hardly an unambiguous blessing. Just look at presidents’ “before” and “after” pictures to see what I mean. George W. Bush looked like he was still uncomfortable in a suit in 2000; now his suits look more at ease than his face, and his once full dark head of hair has become thinner, and unambiguously grey. When Eleanor Roosevelt told Harry Truman that her husband had died, he said, “Eleanor, is there anything I can do for you?” To which Eleanor wisely replied, “Harry, is there anything we can do for you?” No doctor would recommend the job of president to people who cared about their health; no insurance agent would willingly insure a president against death. To be elected president seems, in part, to mean that one is set apart for a certain kind of public suffering. What looks like the polished marble of divine promise turns out, after a few years in the office, to have been the sandstone of simple humanity, forced to wrestle with super-human challenges. Would that we were all a bit more like Eleanor Roosevelt.

Abraham Lincoln at Grant Park in Chicago

Wise presidents seem to know this from the beginning, or at least seem prepared to learn it. Abraham Lincoln famously said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Perhaps, as with God’s election of people, all a president can do is say, “Here I am.” Perhaps all presidents are Abraham.

But in this, as in all things, presidents are simply representatives of the people, the incarnation of the popular will. They suffer for all of us; they take upon themselves what is rightfully ours. If so, our belief that we elect presidents is an illusion; we are simply picking one of us to endure, in a particularly vivid way, what is the rightful desert of all of us. We simply pick someone to be the first to absorb what history throws our way. Our election still rests on events beyond our control. Our election is, once again, consequent to our being elected. Whether by history or God, in this respect, does not matter; what matters is that we receive more than we decide; we are acted upon more than acting, and no one, ironically, more so than the winning candidate, the “leader,” whichever he is, who will now know what it is to be taken by another and led through four years in a way he did not wish to go.

I told you at the beginning of this essay that I was away from home this past weekend. I was in Chicago at the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion. Everyone was talking about the election, of course. But few among my fellow conference-goers seemed to realize the fearful symmetry to which we were witnesses. My conference was in the Chicago Hilton and Towers, fronting Grant Park–the same hotel that the 1968 Democratic National Convention was held in, and the same park that saw the famous Chicago “police riot.” On Friday night, I was in the Presidential Suite on the 24th floor of the hotel, facing out on Grant Park. It was in that suite that the newly nominated Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey sat, tears streaming down his face. The tears were not from sadness or despair, but simply from the tear gas rising from the streets outside; but I like to think that Humphrey’s tears were also a premonition of what that convention’s catastrophe foretold for the Democratic Party: forty years in the wilderness.

Last Friday night, looking out the same windows that that tear gas came in, I saw the tents coming up in Grant Park for the Obama victory party. Tonight, God willing, I say, Obama will hold his victory celebration in Grant Park, with the old Hilton looming overhead, a brooding mausoleum of the ironies of history.

History has not ended. It has ironies in store for all of us, and certainly for a President Obama, or a President McCain. Whoever you supported for the presidency, whichever man wins it, whatever your religious beliefs, or irreligious beliefs, or nonreligious beliefs: Say a prayer, or think a good thought, give all best wishes for the man we elect tonight to be our next Abraham, and watch him as he walks out on his stage, out into the open, to say–still innocent of the blades and cudgels already hurtling at him from the future–“Here I am.” In the years to come, may he be faithful to his words.
–Charles Mathewes teaches theology and ethics at the University of Virginia. His most recent books are A THEOLOGY OF PUBLIC LIFE and PROPHESIES OF GODLESSNESS.

]]>Read more of Kim Lawton’s September 18, 2006 interview with Edwin Hernandez, a visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies:

Q: What are the faith-based influences on Hispanic voters, and how important are those influences?

A: The Latino community in this country is clearly a religious community. It’s traditionally been a community that identifies with strong religious values, with strong family values, and religion influences many issues, day-to-day life issues as well as broader public life issues, and some of the research that has been done on Latino public life suggests that religion has a way of influencing the way people think, their attitudes, their behaviors, and how they align themselves politically in this country.

Q: How have Latinos aligned themselves politically, and how has religion affected that?

A: Traditionally Latinos, like other minorities in this country, have aligned themselves politically, the majority, with the Democratic Party over the last 20 years or so. However, that trend has been changing over the last ten years, I would say, and in large part due to its shifting, both demographics as well as shifting political values, and the realignment is drawn between the Catholic and non-Catholic Latino communities. What we see among the Catholic communities is a more entrenched and closely aligned commitments and affiliations with the Democratic Party, while on the other hand the non-Catholic community, Protestant, evangelical, Pentecostal communities, are more aligning themselves more closely with the Republican Party. And this was particularly seen in the last election where a large percentage of Latino voters voted, about 40 percent voted for President Bush’s campaign of 2004.

Q: What issues and motivations fuel that?

A: Some of the motivations related to this are that Latinos share some core values that seemingly as a group together one would identify them as conservative — conservative on family values, conservative on issues of abortion, conservative on issues of education in terms of strong educational values. Together these key issues of family [and] morality on sexual ethics makes Latinos seem conservative, on these moral issues. On the other hand, there are issues related to education, housing, the job, the economy, and issues that have to do with the bread and butter issues of how can we move up the economic ladder that Latinos align themselves in those other issues in a more progressive, liberal side. The key issue for Latinos and religion on these issues is that it is clear that among the Latino Catholic voters, despite holding some conservative values, [they] are aligned with progressive, more liberal causes, while on the other hand, Latino evangelicals, Pentecostals, while holding also similar conservative moral and political values are beginning to realign themselves more closely with the Republican Party and their platform.

Q: How key has the issue of immigration been in all of this?

A: Recent research from the Pew Hispanic Center suggests that the recent immigration conversations and debates at the national level have significantly impacted the Latino community. For example, a large majority of Latinos in this country say that discrimination has become a greater issue — that Latinos, as a result of these debates and these conversations, have increased discrimination. They also suggest that these events have created the conditions for greater coalition building, for greater unity, that the community — whereas before Latinos have been segmented regionally as well as ethnically. As you know, Latinos are a very diverse community. They are Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, Central American, and these various ethnic groups mean differences of income, of economic status, differences related to religion and differences related to party affiliation. But the recent discussions and events and marches created a sense of unity of cause that has made significant inroads in the creation of potential coalitions of interest that can have far reaching consequences in the political landscape. Perhaps the most telling is the statistic that 75 percent of Latinos in this country say that there will be a significant increase in voter participation in the upcoming elections. Now that is significant, because traditionally Latinos have been not as interested or not as involved politically. Of the total electorate, you know, Latinos who are able to vote, [only] 18 percent of those vote, compared to 39 percent of African Americans and 56 percent of Anglos, for example. So Latinos tend to vote less, but the recent events [have] the potential for increasing the voter pool for Latinos in this country, and that, coupled with the fact that you have a younger population, and by younger meaning a group of young people who — for example, in the last four years from 2000 to 2004, 1.5 million young Latinos became eligible to vote. You have the potential for some significant impact that Latinos vote in this country — but also in the final elections.

Q: Why is immigration so important? How key a moment has this been?

A: The last six months, well, the last year of conversations and debates and marches and public participation — it’s a watershed moment for the Latino community. It’s one of those moments in the life of the community where coalitions are built, where raising of consciousness is created, where a particular group of people realize that if they don’t voice their concerns, if they don’t stand together, organize to say yes, there is a concern around immigration, but we are for the most part law-abiding citizens, productive contributors to this society, our children were born here. We have a lot to contribute to this country, and we want to make sure that our identity and our culture and our humanness is respected and affirmed. So the moment is critical, because the future of this country will increasingly be influenced by Latinos in this country, given the population growth of, given the fact that Latinos represent the largest increase of electoral bloc of potential voters suggest that Latinos in this country, in politics as in other areas of life, will be making increasing impact in significant ways. So it’s a watershed moment that should be carefully heeded by those who are in positions of power, those who have a lot to do with creating coalitions that will last over the lifetime of individuals.

In addition the fact that this is a watershed moment for the Latino communities in terms of bringing different ethnic groups together to work together, bringing greater awareness of their state in this larger society, but there’s also another key factor of this movement that has been created, and that’s the way that people, when they were asked in surveys, did say that this is a new moment, this is a new movement that has been created. But the key factor is that the religious sector, the religious community in this country of the Latinos, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have come together to identify this as a deeply moral issue as well. So this is not just an economic — this is not just a question of rights, a question of the fact that a country has the right to identify its borders, to identify who is a citizen and who’s not, and nobody’s arguing that. But the key thing here is that the coalition of the moral community, of the religious community, around the fact that this is a deeply moral issue, a human rights issue that is of significant importance, that has made them participate as organizers, as individuals to educate the grassroots community on some key issues facing the country.

Q: What are religious leaders saying? How is immigration a moral issue? What are the theological, religious, spiritual, moral foundations of this issue?

A: For the Judeo-Christian community, the question of the stranger living in our midst has a long tradition in scripture, in Old Testament, New Testament, that permeates their understanding of what it means to be a Christian. At the very core of the Christian faith is the notion that how we treat the least of these, those who are strangers in our midst, how we invite them, how we care for them, how we provide for their daily needs, housing, food, care; to that degree we demonstrate the true character of the Christian community. And so for the Latino religious community, the issues of how do we address an increasingly violent border, where because of increased border protection there have over the last ten years been increased deaths of immigrants, because there’s also the question of rights. What rights do individuals who have lived in this country and made this country their home, where their children were born here, where they actively participate in working and providing and contributing, what rights do they have over the long term? So for the religious community, the plight of the undocumented in this country is consistent with this long tradition in scripture of how you treat the alien, the stranger in the midst, that ultimately Christ is found in those, in the least of these and how we treat the least of these we treat Christ. And that, in essence, is the moral call, the moral justification for action and motivation.

Q: How is this bringing together Latino Protestants and Catholics politically?

A: The religious community in this country is clearly divided around many fault lines between denominations, between perspectives on how to address key moral issues facing the country, and clearly the Latino community is no exception to the ways in which denominations tend to divide groups. However, the interesting fact is that the immigration issue and the discussions that have been raised in the last year of discussions and debate has brought Catholic leaders, Protestant leaders, evangelical leaders around the same table to discuss together what should be the response of the religious community. How should we mobilize and educate our parishioners to face these issues? And so at the local level, whether it be in Chicago or New York, L.A., Pentecostal pastors, priests, lay Catholic leaders have come together and joined forces to say we as a community may be divided by faith and other areas, but on this issue we’re coming together because we need to take a stand about the dignity of who Latinos are, because they represent a large part of this community, a large part of the society and the contributions that we’re making. And more importantly we, like many immigrants of generations back, have an equal stake in the future of this country, and we want to have a part of it. So I think the religious community is finding a unique opportunity to voice, to exercise the public responsibilities that heretofore we had not seen before. And this is important because there are many sectors of our religious community, particularly the more conservative evangelical sectors, who had not been as engaged civically or politically, and this represents for them one of those initial opportunities to engage with this sector, to argue or to lobby on behalf of immigration reform, and so that is important, particularly for the more evangelical, conservative sector of the religious community.

Q: What is the fall-out for the political parties? Is that a huge challenge for the Republican Party? And then what are the challenges for the Democrats as well?

A: Findings from the Pew Hispanic Center research of the election of 2004 suggest that the Bush administration, the Republican Party, made significant gains among Latinos in this last election, probably the most ever. About 40 percent of Latinos voted for President Bush. And when you divide that vote among the religious divide, the greatest increase was gained among the evangelical Latino voters. This is important because the political realignment across religion among Latinos is clearly between the Catholic and non-Catholic. And among the non-Catholics, the real divide or the real realignment of affinity towards the Republican Party finds itself around the evangelical and Pentecostal communities, which is the fastest growing sector of the religious community among Latinos in this country. What was very interesting, however, on the most recent 2006 survey of Latinos that the Pew Hispanic Center did suggests that the recent discussions around immigration over the last year or so has not shifted the realignment of Latinos. That is to say as many Latinos are now aligned politically with the Democrats as they are with the Republican Party. There hasn’t been that shift. However, about 40 percent of Latinos now say that the Democratic Party is more Latino-friendly, whereas only 9 percent of Latinos say that the Republican Party is Latino-friendly. So whereas there hasn’t been that realignment of identity of how people identify with a particular political party, there has been a shift on the perception of how a political party is more friendly or not towards the Latino community.

What impact might that have to the future? It’s somewhat unknown. But clearly, clearly this is an issue that for many Latino religious leaders it is worth rethinking their commitments politically. There have been a number of key religious leaders in this country that have gathered together and said to leaders in both political parties, this is an issue of significant importance to us that we’re willing to realign our votes accordingly if you don’t respond to the concerns that we bring to the table. And the concerns that the religious community brings to the table are not any different than concerns of many Americans. Latino religious leaders, and for the most part the parishioners in the pews, are concerned that immigration is out of control, are concerned that things do need to be made clearer, that borders need to be protected, that in this age of increasing terror and risks that there is some legitimate concern [about] borders and orderly processes of immigration. But then not to see Latinos as scapegoated or not to see that there should be a venue, a process whereby unnaturalized citizens, undocumented citizens can find a way to citizenship with the appropriate degrees of both incentives as well as penalties. The thing here is ultimately among both Catholic and evangelical increasingly growing sector is that at the bottom line, what political party responds to the key needs and concerns will ultimately then have their allegiance, and I think that both political parties are understanding that, are hearing and listening carefully because their political futures, to a large extent, will depend upon how these alignments ultimately are figured out.

Q: Are both parties reaching out to this community and indeed recognizing that it’s a key voting bloc, a key community that they need on board?

A: It’s a growing sense that this is true. I think that Latinos have been taken for granted. Latinos are a sleeping giant that has been awakened as a result of these discussions, no doubt about that, and I think both parties’ leadership recognize this to various degrees and are respond accordingly. Perhaps the impact may not be seen in the next few months, but the impact could be seen over the larger spectrum of years and generations — how people’s perceptions of how you treated me, my grandmother, my children, my extended family. Keep in mind that a large sector of the estimated 12 million undocumented in this country have children that have been born here, and those are U.S. citizens. Those are children, you know, two or three million children who will become voters and who will, in the long run, make an impact on how decisions are made in this country.

Q: Right before the 2004 election I did another story looking at Hispanics, and some of the Latino evangelicals told me that for their community the issue of gay marriage was big. Faced with conflicting priorities — Latino voters who are concerned about gay marriage at the same time that they have real concerns about immigration reform — which issue is going to trump the other?

A: Good question. I think the answer to that is still to be seen. It’s a good question that clearly is important and will be important in future decisions in voting, decisions in political realignments of many in the religious sector. But having said that, when you look at the question of immigration, when you have over half of the Latinos in this country saying that discrimination has increased, this discussion around immigration has created what they term a new movement. When it has created alliances across the various ethnic groups, from Cubans in Miami to Puerto Ricans in New York to Mexican-Americans and Chicanos in the Midwest and the West, you have a new moment, because connected to the question of immigration is an issue of dignity, and it’s a question of who you are. How do you stand in the midst of the diversity in this country? It’s a question of defining not just how we should deal with 12 million undocumented, it’s about how do you address and treat 44 million and growing Latinos in this country? My sense is that when these two issues are put together, the questions of immigration and the future of Latinos in this country will play a very important role when people look at political parties and their platforms, because at the very core issue is the question of who are we and how does the rest of society view us? Do they view us as contributing members of this society that brings a lot of important benefits to this country, or are we simply going to be relegated and stereotyped as lawless, as individuals who are simply seeking to benefit without the expense and without contributing as well? It’s a tough issue to know what would trump the other, and I think only time will tell. But at the very core issue the immigration debate is about who we are, and when you put my family, my grandmother, my children — I’m going to protect them, and I’m going to seek their well-being at the expense of any other issue.

Q: Could you outline the specific ways that faith, religious beliefs, a sense of religious community shape Latino attitudes and political motivations?

A: Religion is a key factor in politics in this country, and it is certainly true among Latinos. The church community, for many Latinos — it is the core institution of their community. The church represents a core institution that provides basic services, where they find a home, a sense of belonging. The church is one of those institutions that is owned and operated by the Latino community, and so it is also the place where cultural values are transmitted and preserved and enhanced. Within that setting, the teachings of religious communities enhance and create a greater affinity with issues of family values, increased issues of, for example, abortion, become issues that the clergy and others through their sermons and liturgies accentuate as the pro-life options, as becoming important. Latinos, for example, on the majority tend to be pro-life as a general rule. The cues of clergy play a critical role, what things they hear from Sunday to Sunday, from weekend to weekend, plays a critical role. Take the whole question of the dignity of marriage or the dignity of human life. When those are preached, taught in the context of a local community at church where people participate actively, that has a powerful effect in shaping their attitudes and how they translate those beliefs — whether it be about marriage, whether it be about abortion, whether it be about questions of immigration — to the voting booth, and more so if you participate actively. The more you participate actively in a particular community of faith, the more you’re likely to absorb and internalize those values and translate that into the public life. Now what’s really important about the Latino community and this religious community is that by far the majority of the active, civic-participating individuals, the individuals that volunteer, whether it be for the community, whether it be for the school system in the local district, the far majority of Latinos that volunteer in the community come from the faith community, come from churches, and that fact alone suggests that the civic skills, the motivations, the organizing that takes place within the religious community has a powerful effect in the public sector. It’s not unusual, therefore, for some of the community leaders who are active in organizing politically, who are actively advocating [to] come from Catholic parishes, from local evangelical communities, because it is there where they are gaining the skills necessary, the speaking abilities, the organizing abilities, to make a difference in the public life.

]]>Read more of Kim Lawton’s September 18, 2006 interview with Father Claudio Diaz, director of Hispanic ministry for the Archdiocese of Chicago and administrator of Providence of God Parish:

Q: How influential is religion on Latino voters as they develop their political opinions and motivations?

A: Religion is a very important component within Latino reality here in the States and outside of the States. Definitely, the church is always looking for the benefit of the people of God. In this case, the church in a very particular way is very careful with anything that affects the Hispanic community. The Latinos are 40 percent of Catholic population; therefore it’s a very significant group of the body of Christ, and those 40 percent are the ones we can count. There’s a whole number of Latinos that we cannot count because they don’t register. It’s not part of their tradition, for many other reasons. Therefore, we suspect that the population within the Catholic contingency is higher, perhaps 50-55 percent. When it comes to politics, of course there is an understanding in our Constitution, in our tradition here in the States that Catholic — church and state should be separated. We understand that. However, there are many areas where they do co-mingle, where they do have to work together somehow through a formal agreement or maybe an informal agreement.

Q: What kinds of issues are particularly important to Latinos as they consider their political stands and their votes? What specific issues really matter to them?

A: Some of the specific issues that are very important to the Latino contingency, the Latino population here in the States, is family, is education, is health. If you really think about it, they’re not too different from any other non-Latino realities. But these three in particular — you know, family, education, health and even work — those are issues that are very important to the Latino reality in the United States of America.

Q: How big has the immigration issue been as politicians debate comprehensive immigration reform? Has this really mobilized people in your community?

A: Indeed, indeed. This issue of developing a comprehensive reform for migrants in our country, it has been a force for many members of my parish, and I know many members of parishes all across the United States of America, because it touches the foundation of justice within a particular group here in the States. Many parishioners, many Latinos, many non-Latinos have been part of this wave that deals with our migrant-immigrant community. And as for me, I think it’s very important that we take this seriously, that we do take this seriously, and it doesn’t matter if you’re coming from a political point of view, economical point of view, religious point of view. This is to be taken seriously because it’s a big group we’re talking about, and it’s a group that has been here for many, many, many centuries.

Q: You mentioned the issue of justice. What are some of the religious and spiritual issues that come into play when we’re talking about immigration? What are the theological and spiritual principles behind this community and civic issue?

A: Let’s talk about the theology of immigration. Our theology — the Roman Catholic Church — starts with the Old Testament. In the Old Testament we have the people of God, the Israelites, looking for the Promised Land, looking for a place to be. And from the Old Testament we have teachings on, you know, be good to the foreigner, be good to those who are not in your circle, be good to those who are from outside of your circle, and that teaching has certainly passed to Jesus Christ in the New Testament. In the New Testament, we have the Lord Jesus Christ making connections with the so-called foreigners, you know, with the Roman soldier, with the woman from Canaan and so forth. So it’s a matter of equality. The theology is that foreigners are brothers and sisters through the Lord Jesus Christ. That reality cannot be denied and needs to be addressed. And this is why, from a theological point of view, it makes sense to address this issue, not to pretend that they don’t exist, not to pretend that this is not a big deal; it is a big deal because this is a community that has been with us for centuries and for many, many moments in the history of this nation.

Q: How has immigration mobilized some of the people you work with in your archdiocese and your parish to get involved in civic, political and community issues? Has it mobilized them in ways they have not been involved before?

A: Yes. This issue has moved a lot of people in different ways. My goodness, you’re talking about giving a voice to the voiceless. You’re talking about taking the little ones, those who are undocumented, those who don’t have an identity in our society, and you’re talking to them, with them, and for them. Also, because it’s a matter of justice, you are bringing to the surface, you know, men and women who are part of our society, and the result of that is mobilization. People move because this is such an emotional issue. Yes, it’s political, yes, it’s spiritual, yes, it is religion and economics, but we’re talking emotions. We’re talking human beings, and all kinds of emotions arise, you know, to the discussion of this issue — our immigrant community in the United States. What surprises me is that all kinds of people are coming to the table. This is not just about the Latinos or Hispanics talking. Non-Latinos are talking as well, and non-Latinos are giving voice to the voiceless. Now let’s be fair. This nation was founded on immigrants. A hundred years ago it was the Irish and the Polish and the German, and God bless the Irish and the Polish and the German. Well, now it is the Hispanics. Now it is time for a new group to be attended, to be taken care of, to see what it is that they need to become even better members of our society.

Q: In what specific ways are people making their voices heard?

A: Let’s begin in the spiritual realm. Prayer services, masses, liturgies — that’s the first step as a Catholic Latino. You know, you start from God; then you move along. You go to different kinds of marches, different kinds of vigils in front of a senator’s office, a congressman. We did go to Washington, you know, and then we move to the level of politics. You know, we start an exchange among politicians, and hopefully we will get to the White House, to our president, to see if we can have a healthy discussion. So as you see, we’re moving in different directions in the house, spiritually speaking, in our surroundings, as we do marches and vigils and [move] into politics.

Q: Are people more politically interested than they have in the past? Are people registering to vote? Do you expect to see a new political movement?

A: What I’m saying is that on this particular issue there is far more involvement than on other issues in the past.

Q: You mentioned Latino Catholics are very concerned about family issues. Some Latino Catholics were mobilizing with the church against gay marriage and against abortion and conservative social issues that are important to the community. If you put those issues up against immigration, which one is going to take priority for the Latino voter?

A: I think for the Latino voter the issue of immigration will be number one, because it defines so many things. It defines so many things. It defines the identity of a human being in these surroundings which are the United States of America.

Q: And what message should politicians and the political parties take from all of that?

A: I think that they should listen. They should listen to the people. You know, they should listen to all parts involved and to listen in a very objective way, in a very intelligent way, you know — one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Q: Politicians are also hearing from conservative constituents who are concerned about protecting borders. Do you think they are receptive to that?

A: I am under the impression that there is a receptivity on behalf of all politicians. I don’t know the intention of that receptivity. Some of them might do it because they want more votes. Who knows? Others do it because of justice; others do it because it is the “in” issue and the vote issue at this point. I don’t know the real intentions of all of them. What I’m telling you is that certainly politicians are interested in this. Whether you are from the left or from the right, if you want to be a politician in the year 2006, you have to deal with the issue of immigration.

Q: What do you think the long-term impact of the Latino political movement will be in the U.S.?

A: I think this is going to have an impact. I think this is going to leave some kind of a mark in the history of rights and in the history of civil rights and in the history of the rights of the foreigners, if there is such thing in this country. I think it will leave a mark, and we’re making history. We are making history. Again, our nation, first-world country, first-world nation, has a big influence all across the world, but we have to start from here in the house.

Q: What do the people you deal with every day experience? How has this political and community issue affected them and their outlook on the kind of voice they might have in America?

A: Fr my parishioners this movement has certainly been very crucial on many levels. The first level is the reality that they have to verify their identity, and that means that they have to be informed, they have to be part of the process of lawmaking. They have to be — they have to have a voice within the whole process. Whether that voice is heard or not, that should be taken care of and should be taken into account. But they want to be part of that process that somehow will determine their lives and their future. So it’s been like a jolt of energy to really have a group of people be updated, get informed, be organized. Notice that many of these marches that have involved immigrants in the Latino reality — they haven’t been tinted by a wave of violence. You don’t hear that. Of course, you may hear an event here, maybe something happened over there, but those are isolated events. You don’t see that as the trademark of the Hispanic immigrant movement as we speak. So for the first time a group of people in a very nonviolent way here in the States are speaking and are talking and are saying, “Take us into account. Let’s go to the table, let’s work together.”

Q: And what responsibility does the Catholic Church have to be one of the institutions doing the informing and organizing on this?

A: The church has the responsibility and the duty, the Christian duty, to give voice to the voiceless, to be for the little ones, to walk with all the children of God and in this case to walk with the immigrant community. I just hope for America to really, really open their eyes. I hope for the United States of America to understand the richness that this particular group brings, you know. We are a nation, once again, founded on immigrants. Then let’s deal with this new group of immigrants in a fair, Christian fashion.

Q: What challenges do you see for the two political parties as they deal with the immigration issue?

A: Both main parties here in the United States of America do have challenges. They do have challenges on other levels. But when it comes to the immigration level, they both have challenges, because the question is, why am I doing this? Why am I listening to the immigrant community or why not? Sometimes I feel that they don’t know the answer to that question. And if the answer is a very private, selfish question whichever way because you want to gain some votes or because you want to do what you think is right from your political perspective, either way are two extremes in the spectrum. But I think that the political parties should listen and should have only the best intentions when dealing with the immigrants. Even though as a church we cannot be political, as in allegiance to a particular party, we are to be political because we are political creatures, except that as a Christian you will be a political creature from the perspective, the platform of Jesus Christ.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: It’s impossible to measure religious experience, but it is possible to ask people about their beliefs and practices, and we did that in our national survey conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.

At a press conference this week, Anna Greenberg, who directed the poll, announced the results. She is a specialist on religion and politics, and the role of churches in public life.

Joining her was political scientist John Green, also an expert on religion and public life, and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio.

Afterwards, I asked what survey findings surprised them.

ANNA GREENBERG (Vice President, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Inc.): I think what surprised me the most was how part of the mainstream evangelicals are. They watch the same amount of television, they live in the same places, they go to churches of the same size.

The biggest difference is their beliefs and their practices. They have very strong and conservative religious beliefs, and they put them into practice at a level of great intensity, compared to anybody else.

Professor JOHN GREEN (Director, Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, University of Akron): The thing that surprised me the most was the stark evidence of the ambivalent feelings that evangelicals have toward American society, with three quarters saying that they feel they’re part of the American mainstream and an equal number, three quarters, believing that they have to fight hard to get their point of view across. But, they also feel that the news media is very hostile to them. And about half of them feel that other Americans look down on them. So this is a group that feels in some ways comfortable with American society, but in other respects still estranged and still apart.

ABERNETHY: I think the thing that surprised me the most was how not only evangelicals but everybody else felt the country is on the wrong track when it comes to moral values.

Ms. GREENBERG: That’s right. When you ask evangelicals, “What’s the most important thing that concerns you?” moral values is their number-one issue. Though I should say, other issues — economic issues — are important to them as well. When you ask them, “What’s your biggest worry?” the strongest thing, the thing that comes out, is children not learning the right values. And in fact, all Americans feel that way. The difference between all Americans and evangelicals is evangelicals act upon these concerns. In other words, they have these concerns about their kids’ values, and that influences what kind of television they expose them to. Other Americans aren’t as likely to say that their view of the kind of, moral sort of direction of the country has the same kind of impact on their behavior.

Prof. GREEN: Part of what may be going on in that question is that there is a great disagreement in the United States about moral values — some people wanting to emphasize family and children and sexual issues, other people wanting to talk about war and peace, social justice, the regulation of the marketplace. And Americans, I think, are revealing that those are very major conflicts today.

ABERNETHY: John, what does this new survey have to say about evangelicals and politics in 2004?

Prof. GREEN: Well, you know, the last couple of years white evangelicals have been seen as a strong Republican constituency. They voted very heavily for George Bush in 2000, and our survey suggests that that support for Bush is maintained. For instance, we found that 71 percent of white evangelicals said they would vote for Bush over Kerry if the election were held today. So these are clearly a conservative or Republican group. But you know, they are not monolithically so. About 23 percent said they would vote for Kerry, and it’s possible that, under [certain] circumstances, the Democrats might get even a few more votes.

ABERNETHY: What circumstances?

Prof. GREEN: If the social issues come up in the campaign in a way that allows the economic and foreign policy concerns of evangelicals to be relevant to their votes.

Ms. GREENBERG: They are very interested in being strong militarily, very strong on the war on terrorism, very strong on Iraq. And that is, I think, as set of positions that probably favors Bush.

ABERNETHY: Anna, are there signs that evangelicals are becoming what you might call more tolerant?

Ms. GREENBERG: I think there are. We would expect, given the intense religious and theological beliefs that evangelicals have, that they would have a pretty rigid, you know, view about who is saved and who is not saved. It turns out only about half, even less than half, say we have to be born again in order to be saved; [that] suggests, you know, openness to other Christians and openness to other people. If you look at issues, it also looks like they are becoming more tolerant. We asked this question about gay marriage. Overwhelmingly, 82 percent say they are against gay marriage. But when you ask them, “Do we need a constitutional amendment?” only about half of them say we need an amendment. The other half says state laws are sufficient.

I think there was some sense, probably on the right, that this would be sort of a home run with this base group for the Republican Party. But, in fact, you know, a majority think that, you know, the laws are okay.

When we asked them, “Would you vote for a candidate who held a different position than you on the question of gay marriage?” only about 47 percent said, “I would vote against that candidate if they had a different view than me.” The rest were okay. So it’s not even a litmus test for them. So I’m not sure if they’re becoming more open or tolerant, per se, but they certainly have nuanced views about these issues.

ABERNETHY: And what about evangelizing? Do evangelicals think they must try to convert others, or is it enough to talk about one’s faith, to share it?

Ms. GREENBERG: It doesn’t have to be a deliberate attempt to convert. It can just be spreading the “good news,” talking with friends, talking with family. About 75 percent say on a weekly basis they just talk about these issues.

Prof. GREEN: But there is a difference in the survey, though, between sharing one’s faith, talking about one’s faith, and actually trying to convert people. And significantly fewer evangelicals say that they actually try to convert people than say they simply share their faith with others.